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In article <1jmvk1INN4qr@armory.centerline.com> chapman@centerline.com writes:
>In article 93Jan21120904@tatjana.rice.edu, pete@tatjana.rice.edu (Louis Wu) writes:
>>In article <1jmdsqINN4qr@armory.centerline.com> chapman@centerline.com (Scott Chapman, (Scott Chapman x233)) writes:
>>
>>   >When buying mutual funds, it asks me the # of shares and price/share. I buy
>>   >mutual funds by dollar amount not units of shares. So I have to use a
>>   >calculator to figure out # of shares based on the dollar amount and price
>>   >per share.
>>   You are mistaken here, most (if not all) mutual funds *are* sold by shares.
>>
>>Not when you have a set amount of money automatically withdrawn from a bank
>>account by a mutual fund each week. 

     I use MYM to track my mutual funds.  The secret is knowing that it
is the amount of shares and the dollar value that matters, not the
price/share value.

     On your mutual fund statement that you get in the mail, the total
shares you own is the exact sum of all the shares of all the purchases
you see.  There are no hidden significant digits.  Therefore, if you
use your calculator to divide cost by price per share,  you will get
a share amount with lots of trailing digits.  But that isn't the actual
number of shares you get in the transaction.  It's rounded off to the
2nd or 3rd decimal depending on which company you have.

    So what should you do?  WHen you make an entry in MYM, type in the
dollar value and the number of shares.  MYM will automatically
calculate the price/share.  This price/share will be slightly
different from the one you see on the statement, but it doesn't matter
since it's better to be wrong about the exact price/share of each
lot than to gradually accumulate errors in the number of shares you own.
Also, the more shares your transaction is, the smaller the error will be.

    I don't think your cost basis and taxes will really be affected
by having a tiny difference in share price.


Hope this helps,  all other good suggestions appreciated,

Chester Liu
cht@titan.ucc.umass.edu